Hull CS50 movie is back from the film lab

A few weeks ago we had our event celebrating 50 years of Computer Science at Hull. During the event we took some 16mm movie film on a 70 year old camera. We weren’t sure whether it would come out or not, but we sent the film off for processing anyway.

It came back today and it seems to have worked. The old clockwork Bolex camera that we used has done us proud. Above you can see particularly terrifying still from the film. We are going to improve the contrast and generally spruce things up.

How not to organize an event...

Hull CS50 was great, but I always write down a list of things that I might want to think about next time I help to run something like this:

• The Fisher Price Code a pillar is a great toy for kids and grownups to play with. You can track them down on eBay if you really want one. If you want to hack one, take a look here.

• When you are printing the signs for an event it is a good idea not to print them double sided.

• Talking of signs, don’t laminate them if they are going into Perspex holders. They won’t fit.

• If you decide to use RFID cards to manage the free drink allocation, take a log of all the unique card numbers before you start and build them into your application. Otherwise you’ll find smart students using their university cards, bank cards and maybe even playing cards to get drinks. Fortunately the folks doing this were showing off - nobody got extra drinks like this. But next time it will be properly secure….

• Don’t work on the basis that all your RFID cards will work. Turns out that if you buy 50 cards for an attractive price quite a few of them will not work.

• The bits that you think will be most busy won’t be. I thought that the busiest time would be the quiz at the end, but in the end we had peek attendance at the talks.

• People love having lots of things to do around them, even though they might not actually go and do them all.

• Don’t deploy a new version of your robot manager software at 6:00am on the morning of the event. It will break and you will have a very nervous few minutes waiting for someone good with GitHub (in this case number one son) to pull back the previous version and deploy that.

• Always take a picture of your audience. I completely forgot to do this during the talks (if you’ve got any pictures I’d love to have copies).

• If you’ve not seen a little lady totally over the moon because her delegate badge is a match for the one on the dalek, you’ve really not lived.

• Get T-shirts made. They add a lot. We got ours printed here. And modern banking systems make it really easy for people to pay for them. I used a Monzo link and it worked a treat.

• Remember that having fun beats everything else. If folks are enjoying themselves doing what they are doing, you really don’t need to go and tell them what they should be doing to have fun.

Hull CS50 Was Awesome

UnFair Quiz Survivors

Well, HullCS50 was the most fun. I took a bunch of cameras with plans to take a bunch of pictures. Didn’t take one. I was too busy chatting to folks and showing off the robots and bits and bobs. We had 40 or so people embedded in carbonite, lots of “Badge Answer Buddies” and even some slow-motion Scalextric crashes - including one which took out the phone filming it. The quiz was universally acknowledged as extremely unfair, so mission accomplished there too.

Many thanks to the “elves” who kept the show on the road. Thanks also to the Computer Science Systems team who went above and beyond to get everything working and the folks in the Canham Turner building who provided great support and lovely food. Thanks also to the sponsors: Black Marble, RJJ Software, and Visr-vr. Without your contributions we wouldn’t have had an event.

Everyone seemed to be having a good time. One question that kept coming up was “When is the next one?”. We’ll have to work on that.

Ready - ish

Well, we’ve got signs for all the activities, printed the answer sheets for the unfair quiz, tested the WiFi coverage at the venue, tested the carbonizer, got most of the slot cars running and written most of the unfair quiz questions.

At this point the only thing you can do is hope that you’ve not forgotten anything important, and that the stuff you’ve remembered will get you through. And then head to Wetherspoons on the campus to meet up with folks who will be coming along tomorrow….

Exciting times..

Using Brother P-Touch software with Windows 11

Some old software never dies. Take the Brother P-Touch software that I got with the thermal label printer I bought around 15 years ago. It still works on Windows 11. I’m using it to make the labels to go on the cards for delegates to the Hull CS50 event on Saturday. The labels will wrap around the cards. On the front will be the event logo and the name of the delegate. On the back will be the sponsors logo (thanks so much RJJ Software) and an answer from the scavenger hunt quiz.

I’m using mail merge to get the values from a CSV (comma separated values) list I’m exporting from the list of ticket sales. It’s not optimal, in that I don’t have a name for every attendee. If someone has bought four tickets I only have the name of the buyer, not the folks using those tickets. Anyhoo, I’ve found a way around that and I’m doing the merge. And it works fine until I save the label design, at which point the the first name field for the merge becomes corrupted. Wah.

Took a while to figure out what is happening. Its all about character encoding. The P-Touch program seems to get confused by the text in the file unless you save it as ANSI format text. Then it works a treat. A lovely example of a great piece of software, written years ago and still good today.

I’ve now got all the labels printed and number one wife and number one son spent this evening putting them on the cards and getting them into order for distribution on Saturday. Getting quite excited now…

RFID tags working

I’ve got the RFID tags working for the free drinks at Hull CS50. The first time you touch your card on the reader you get a green light. The second and subsequent times you do this you get a red light. There’s also a magic “reset” card (which I really mustn’t lose) which you can use to reset the card storage and let everyone order drinks again.

It was suggested that we just use drinks tickets. But where’s the technical fun in that?

Hull CS50 is Go!

Actually Hull CS50 has been go for a while. Ever since the first ticket was sold. We seem to have gone from “What if nobody comes?” to “What are we going to do with all the people that are coming?” in a few short days. I blame the student tendency to leave booking things until the very last minute….

Anyhoo, we’re in the final planning phase and today we took a walk around the venue. It’s a lovely place. We’ve got the whole of the ground floor of the Canham Turner building to play with. Plenty of room for slot cars, carbonization, robots, retro games, troublesome tanks. And Daleks.

Hull CS50 Three Thing Game Registration Open

If you want to take part in Three Thing Game as part of our CS50 Anniversary celebrations you can now register here. You don’t have to come to Hull to take part, you will be able to pick your things and submit your entries using the magic of the interwebs. Find out more about the event (and buy your T shirt) here.

Hull CS50 T Shirts - and don't forget to register

Our 50th Anniversary celebration is in two weeks. Time to think about some T shirts… I’ve created a poll in the Announcements thread on the Discord channel for the event. If you fancy a shirt to celebrate the occasion, put a vote in and I’ll set up a way you can get one.

If you are coming next week it will be lovely to see you. We are working on content for the event at the moment. If you’ve not registered you really should do soon, we will be closing registrations soon so that we can finalise the numbers. You can find out more about the event here.

Hull CS50 Stories Wanted

We’ve decided that it might be fun to have a printed programme for our 50th Anniversary event. Inside we are going to have some stories from folks from the past. If you’ve got any tales of times you spent in Hull it would be lovely to hear from your. Send them to stores@hullcs50.com

Planning the Computer Science 50th Anniversary

We had another planning meeting for our 50th anniversary celebrations today. It’s going to be fun. If you’ve been in the department as student or staff we’d love to see you. You can find out more here.

150 RFID Cards...

I seem to have bought 150 RFID cards. As you do. I’ve been playing with RFID tag stuff for over ten years. The cards I’ve bought aren’t particularly special, but I think they have some internal storage too, which makes them even more interesting. And I do have plans for them. I don’t just spend 25 quid on a whim you know….

First plan is to give one to everyone who comes to the Hull Computer Science 50th Anniversary Celebration in October. I’m going to scatter a few readers around the place and use them to manage the free drinks. We also might have a go at some kind of RFID based Ultimate Werewolf thing.

Second plan is to fit a bunch to the bottom of the HullPixelbot robot arena so that I can fit readers to the robots and they can navigate by reading cards at different positions.

Hmmm. Having thought about it, perhaps I should buy some more…

Hull CS50 looking good

Warren asked me for some words about the upcoming Hull Computer Science 50th Anniversary.

The celebration runs over Friday 11th October and Saturday 12th and takes place on the Hull University campus. We start with a welcome event on Friday evening, but the main celebration event is on Saturday 12th. We'll have robot rugby for the kids, research talks, campus tours, Hull Stories, Retro video games, embed you in carbonite with our 3D printers, slot car racing, and a 'Computer Science Welcome Party Redux' in the evening where you can relive your first departmental social engagement at Hull, complete with a dodgy quiz.

If you fancy a doing a bit of coding while you’re here, we'll also be running a Three Thing Game hackathon. Get your three 'game things' at our online event on the evening of Wednesday 9th of October and then spend as much time as you like building something impressive in our lab. We’ll be judging the games on Saturday afternoon and then presenting the winners that during the welcome party.

Ticket holders will get lunch and dinner on the Saturday, and those awfully nice folks at Visr (visr-vr.com) have put some money behind the bar for the evening celebrations. Why not come for the weekend and spend Sunday exploring the city or revisiting old haunts.

The event will formally start on Friday 11th of October at 6:00pm with a meetup on campus. A good place to meet up and unwind after your journey up to Hull. We'll be around to chat about the old times.

On Saturday morning our day of celebration starts at 11:00am with tours around the campus, or a coffee in the Bronte Brasserie. We'll have a memory board for pictures from the past (send us some if you want to be famous-ish) plus retro consoles to play on. After lunch we'll have a sequence of micro-talks, starting with an overview of current research activities and then moving onto stories from Hull past and present. If you've got something to tell we'd love to hear from you.

At 4:30 we'll award the prizes for the Three Thing Game competition and serve out the food. Then, at 7:00pm we start the evening's entertainments with a 'Welcome Party Redux'. If you've got fond memories of your first social gathering here this is your chance to relive them.

We're going to have a Welcome Quiz with fiendish questions, retro games, slot car racing we'll even 3D scan you and create an image of you in carbonite.

(this programme is slightly provisional and may be subject to change - especially if we can't find any carbonite)

You can find out more (and maybe even register) here.

HULL CS50 Postponed until later in the year

It’s a good thing we didn’t put the date of the event on the logo..

We’ve been forced to postpone our anniversary event. It has not proved possible to get everything in place for the date in May. Some things take longer than you expect, even if you plan for this.

The good news is that the event will be going ahead later in the year, with a date to be announced very soon. If you want to get the earliest notifications, and take part in the conversation, head over to the Discord channel for the event.

Racing Cubes with a PlayStation 2

All I need now is 15,000 credits…

Today we got our PlayStation 2 down from the loft to see if it still works. We’ve not had much luck with the PlayStation 1 - that had succumbed to a malaise that seems to have broken the CD player - but the PS2 works fine. We popped in a copy of Gran Turismo 3 and discovered that not only does the game work fine (and is still great fun to play) but you can also buy a Nissan Cube to “race”. As Cube driver (although not the model above unfortunately) this was all rather exciting. We were using a really fancy device that takes low resolution video signals and turns them into clean looking HDMI video. We are getting our retro games consoles together for the Hull CS50 celebrations and we should now have Gran Turismo 3 - with force feedback steering wheel…

HullCS50 Coaster

Shown with mug for scale..

If you fancy making your own drinks coaster to celebrate fifty years of Computer Science at Hull I’ve put the design on the web site here. It will print directly on a Bambu device. I've put filament changes in the file so that you can get a nice contrast.

You can find out more about our celebration plans here.

HULL CS50 Car Fixed

The spare part for our Scalextric car arrived today. This means we should be back up to six car racing for the Hull Computer Science 50th Anniversary Celebrations in May. You can find out more here.

All ready for a few more laps.

Scalectrics at the Hull CS50

Just needs a new rear axle…..

Had another planning meeting today for the Hull University Computer Science 50th Anniversary Celebrations. It was the best kind of meeting. We set up a tiny track and tested some of the Scalectrics cars we used to use for our welcome parties. The good news is that 5 of the 6 cars work OK (although they’ll need a bit of tidying up). So we’re going to set up the big track and having it running during the event. If you’ve been to Hull as student or staff in the last fifty years we’d love to see you. Find out more here.

Hullcs50.com is live

..hence the need for some of my old pictures…

Spent a big chunk of today wrangling with HTML. As a result the website for the Hull Computer Science 50th Anniversary Celebrations is now live. We’ve not set up registration just yet, but at least this will let you clear space in your diaries and get an idea of what is going on.

It’s going to be awesome.